Tour de Fleece, Day 19.

Ostensibly a Day of Rest.

Yeah, I’ve been kind of scarce around here since Day 8, I know. Most of what I’ve been working on has been either A) not too interesting because it was merely more of the same (I’m a little beyond the halfway mark with combing the CVM, and just how much grey can you stand to see?), or B) under a special temporary version of the Stealth heading (nearly finished with that, and hoping for a reveal before the Tour is over). Oh, or C) - late-night breakthrough craziness of the kind that leaves you too exhausted and bleary to post. I’ve been taking pictures, at least. Have every intention of doing a comprehensive round-up post at the end of the Tour - and you know what they say about good intentions.

Meanwhile, this.

The other day, in the comments to the gradient skein post, Dan said something that really got me thinking. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?)

To wit:

But yes, this is where you find that you are, in fact, a Knitter at heart. Just as I am a Spinner… and a knitter, not a Knitter.

It’s certainly true in part. There is no denying that I am a Knitter - have been one for nearly as long as I can remember. But I think the point made there - in my decision about the fate of the gradient skein - is not that I am a Knitter; the point is that it demonstrates which kind of Knitter I am. I know plenty of knitters AND plenty of Knitters who would happily and successfully knit with a gradient yarn like that - or with the gradient-repeat variant that I’m still contemplating. Me… not so much. Me… laid-back and slipshod about so many other things in my life… when I knit I design, and when I design I need to control. Unlike some Knitters and Designers, I can’t let my yarn be the boss of me. Mind you, it’s a perfectly valid way to work; it just isn’t mine.

(Incidentally, I suspect that in truth Dan himself is fundamentally more Knitter than knitter, or at any rate could be if he chose. No one who has heard him talk about the transparency of sock construction could doubt it.)

Sure, Knitter at heart - you bet. All those tsocks in their tserried ranks to prove it. But - as someone once said about a second marriage after widowhood - my heart is a garden, and there is room in it for more than one flower. Knitter at heart, yes; but Spinner at heart, too. They’re not mutually exclusive.

I put it to you that if I weren’t also a Spinner at heart, I would never have made that skein at all. I did not need to see it to know that I wasn’t likely to knit with it. I knew that about myself, and about this yarn, long before I began work on it. I needed to see it, needed to make it, for its own sake.

Marcy, a Spinner at heart if ever I met one, is fond of playing out the following semi-apocryphal dialogue between muggle and spinner:

     Q: What’re ya makin’?
     A: Yarn.
     Q: What’re ya gonna do with it after?
     A: Have yarn. Dur.

That’s the Spinner speaking. The spinner may make any number of sample skeins as part of the production process, but it’s only the Spinner who makes yarn purely for the sake of making yarn; who makes yarn just to see how a particular combination of techniques and materials will work; who makes yarn that will live out its honorable life as a Petting Skein or an Ogling Skein.

The other day I spun my first long bast fiber; actually I blended hemp with bamboo, so a long bast fiber combined with a rayon-process fiber. I spun one strand of that and I plied it with a strand of cotton I’d spun on the charkha. Why? Because. Because I wanted to see how that combination of fibers would work together in that configuration. Because I wanted to see what it would be like to spin. Because - like the mountain - it was there.

I got my answers. I learned that I like spinning hemp, and that it’s a whole new and different experience from any spinning I’ve done before. I learned that those fibers work well together; I learned something about how to spin them and how to ply them and how to finish them. And I came away from it with 130 yards of yarn that may or may not ever be anything other than a Petting Skein, a trophy and memento of this particular spinning lesson.

I might make something out of it. I might make another yarn like it to make something out of. But I might not, and if I don’t that will be perfectly fine. Sometimes - often - yarn is made for a particular purpose, as a means to an end… but sometimes yarn is an entirely satisfying end in itself.

I put it to you that only a Spinner could feel that way about it.

More to the point, or at any rate equally so… only a Spinner, and a loony one at that, would make an 18-ply yarn purely for the sake of making an 18-ply yarn. Purely for the joy of trying. Purely for the satisfaction of figuring out how. Purely because the tools and materials are available and therefore it is imperative to find out whether it can be done.

And also, not so purely… on a dare.

You already know that I did exactly that for exactly those reasons. Now… gonna show you how.

Members of Team Russian Underpants, grab your popcorn.

Ken Burns, eat your heart out. From the same studio that brought you the Short-Draw Speed-Spinning Smackdown (oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard yet about the S-D SSS, have you), we now proudly present Fran’s inspired video production of the 18-ply Escapade - what Pam in the comments so aptly dubbed the Docu-Nuttery.

As for Fran - well, there’s no thanking her enough. And her work speaks for itself.

So without further ado, here it is, straight from the Oh!Zone:

Yeah. Tell me anyone but a Spinner at heart would do that. I rest my case.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Spinning, Tour de Fleece. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.